Setting the Home address on Mazda’s Connect Navigation App is done during the first-time setup of the navigation App, set it and forget, but it’s not obvious how to change the Home address at a later time.

Here’s how to update the Home address on the MZD Connect Navigation App:

Start your Mazda car and wait for the Mazda Connect platform to load

Open the Navigation App

Select Favourites from the Navigation menu

Highlight the Home menu option

Press and hold down the Commander button down for up to 5 seconds *

Select Edit to update the Home address

Set your City/Suburb, followed by Street and Number

Save your changes

That’s it! 🙂

* The Commander button is shown as the main dial in the lead image above this Post that you use to interact with the Connect platform whilst driving.

Here’s how to re-map the default Calculator keyboard “shortcut key” to instead send the Play/Pause media command under Windows 10; alot more useful!

This guide is aimed at the Amazonbasics Wired Keyboard but applies to any keyboard making use of the standard Windows media/shortcut key codes. A requirement is that you are using a supported media player including iTunes, Spotify, Windows Media Player or VLC.

I brought my XPS 15 9550’s hard disk back from the brink today. I hope this will help other affected XPS 15 9550 users or just Windows users in general.

The XPS 15 9550 was powered down as usual and on reboot would go directly from the Dell POST logo to the Dell diagnostic software (Enhanced Pre-Boot System Assessment). That’s not a good sign.

After running through common diagnostic steps with Dell Support a new hard drive was ordered and installation scheduled for the following day (unit was covered under a Next Business Day support contract). As Dell Support put it the hard disk was dead without any chance of recovery… or was there? 😉

Here’s how to recover your Windows instance in the case where the hard disk hardware is still being detected and simply has no UEFI boot entries:

Open BIOS Setup by powering up the XPS 15 and tapping F12

Open the Settings > General > Boot Sequence screen

Ensure that UEFI is selected under Boot List Option

Click Add Boot Option

Provide a Boot Order Name (it can be anything, I used Bootx64)

Select the available File System List

Set the File Name to: \EFI\Boot\bootx64.efi or click the ‘…’ button and expand the EFI > Boot directory and select bootx64.efi before pressing OK

Click OK to create the new EFI boot entry

Select the new EFI boot entry

Click Apply

Click Exit

Fingers crossed! That’s it, I hope you’re back up and running again. 🙂

I can put at least 3 of the above motherboard replacements down to me telling them “the CPU fan is too loud” which was blamed by Dell Support and on-site technicians on issues with the motherboard and promptly replaced.

The fix for the loud CPU fan – especially when a Thunderbolt device is connected – is to turn on passive cooling within Power Options and using Intel XTU undervolt the CPU 0.100 V dramatically lowering the thermal profile of the XPS 15 9550 followed by setting Dell Command Power Manager to Quiet.

Today I have a silent machine with no noticeable effect on daily usage or CS:GO gaming performance, that’s with 2 Dell U2414H monitors occupying the HDMI and Thunderbolt connectors. I have multiple Chrome tabs open (10+), Slack and other typical CPU hogs running without the CPU fan attempting to rise off the desk.

By default Mazda Connect’s Watchdog service restarts the CMU on any error, to the general public this is a god send as the Watchdog resolves common issues by rebooting the system (e.g. Navi going silent, any screen lock-ups, etc.) but for developers this can have the unintended action of locking us out of SSH access from a simple mistyped character.

Here’s how to turn the Mazda Connect Watchdog service off, keep in mind this command only persists until the Mazda Connect system is rebooted (e.g. after turning the engine off for a short period of time).

echo 1 > /sys/class/gpio/Watchdog\ Disable/value

You can check if the Watchdog service is now inactive by running:

cat /sys/class/gpio/Watchdog\ Disable/value

There are ample instructions online for how to set up the above command to persist even after rebooting but I won’t provide this here.

As always the installation and initial setup is a breeze, open up Google Cloud Platform and within the search bar type in “WordPress”, one of the available options is called “WordPress – Click to Deploy”, select that then enter the following details:

Automatic firewall rules for HTTP/HTTPS traffic (turn this on or you’ll need to do it later)

Then hit Click Deploy and away it goes, a minute or so later a set of logins are provided including a default admin WordPress User and login details, if phpMyAdmin was selected a default root User login is provided.

By default a dynamic IP is allocated to your WordPress instance so you’ll need to open Menu > Networking > External IP address and change the type to Static for persistent WordPress sites.

If you intend to manage your WordPress site via SFTP (FTP over SSH) then you’ll need to adjust your SSH user so that it can create and edit files within the base WordPress directory, to do this open the Google Cloud Shell within your WordPress instance by opening Menu > Compute Engine > VM Instances > under the Connect column beside your WordPress instance click SSH.

id
sudo useradd -G visser www-data

(replace visser with your SSH user name displayed when you enter id)

Adjust the file permissions and ownership of wp-config.php within your base WordPress directory then create a new .htaccess file.

Lastly let’s change the WordPress URL from the IP address allocated (e.g. http://35.197.92.168 to http://visser.io) and turn on Permalinks.

To change your WordPress URL open the WordPress Administration using the logins provided when your WordPress instance was created then open the Settings > General screen. Change only the WordPress Address (URL) field to your preferred URL – do not change the Site Address (URL) field – then hit Save Changes.

To enable Permalinks open up the General > Permalinks screen, within the Common Settings section change the radio button selector to Custom Structure and within the text input field paste the following (or your preferred Permalink structure):